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Whiny Blood+ Review

Blood+ is a 2005 anime directed by Junichi Fujisaku. It was (very loosely) based off of the movie Blood: The Last Vampire and was supposed to be some sort of amazing epic action horror drama filled to the brim with glorious characterization where the creative staff flaunt how much money they’ve put into this project by hiring Mark Mancina as the composer. I can’t keep making this sound like it’s great, guys. This is a whiny review for a reason, so let’s get to the whining.

But first… man that music sure is nice. The cool thing about all these silly Japanese cartoons is that when you see a western name (or really any non-Asian name, for that matter) in the credits, that person is bound to be pretty awesome. Like all those random amazing animators Toei has like Rem Valencia and Paul Año-Nuevo. Mark Mancina is of course no exception, and they’ve even got Hans Zimmer doing the music production work. The end result is that Blood+ has really good music. Cool.

Blood+ also has two of my most favourite opening sequences in anime ever. The second and third openings have such amazing senses of style and I like the second opening’s song more than anything Mark Mancina did for this. But the praise basically stops here.

While it would be really amazing if all of Blood+ was animated in the style of its third opening sequence, the unfortunate fact is that its style is rather generic and unremarkable, at least in comparison to that. Most anime are guilty of this by definition, of course. But even the animation quality is very lacking, with only four or five of its 50 episodes having anything really noteworthy.

For a series that’s supposed to be an action series, it sure spends a lot of time on everything other than action scenes. The action scenes that are there are typically short, and typically not very sweet. It’s boring when every single fight is Hagi getting stabbed a billion times, Saya flailing her sword around uselessly until it’s just time to end the fight and then suddenly her sword works. Sometimes they skip straight to the final step, which results in incredibly short fight scenes, of course.

Most of its time is spent on the drama. Only… it’s not very good, either. It just feels like they’re pulling out every cliched bad thing that could happen, especially in the first half of the series. This makes it really predictable. This would have been acceptable had we ever been given any reason to care about the characters dealing with this stuff. But, well, that doesn’t really happen either.

The problem is that none of these characters have any real depth to them. They barely even have anime-depth. They basically have one personality trait and one goal, and nothing else. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were literally all written that way. “Saya is angsty. Saya wants to angst about how she’s different from everyone else (except she was treated the same as everyone else so why is this a problem again?). Hagi is quiet. Hagi wants to be with Saya. Kai is insecure in an irritable way. Kai wants to be with Saya. Mao is a complete badass. Mao wants to be the only likeable character.” Not very good characters, generally.

But that’s what it spends most of its time on. This gets worse in the second half, where it feels like almost nothing actually happens for at least 10 episodes straight. There’s barely even any drama or melodrama or fighting during this period.

I don’t want to say Blood+ is genuinely bad, but I do want to say it’s mediocre. There is nothing special here. And if you’re going to make someone sit through 50 episodes of something, it better be good, darn it! Here are some important facts about Blood+, to acknowledge the few things about it that actually are special:

• Blood+ has a lot of reverse harem elements, so if you’re into that it’ll be a lot easier to find something to like here.
• Hagi puts his cello back into its case with the endpin still out (this is not possible; his case does not have a hole for it).
• Akiko Yajima is really really mean to Akiko Yajima and does very unique (and mean) things to Akiko Yajima. If you watch it with Japanese audio, anyway.

tl;dr Don’t watch this for the title. It’s a lie. Watch it only if you want to watch attractive devoted gentlemanly guys being violent and sometimes gentlemanly.

to me though, i think the goal of blood plus was to humanize Saya. in The Last Vampire, she was a killing machine with no sympathy for anyone. the basic anti-hero and Blood + was about exploring the character that is Saya. they gave her a family, a emotions and they explored her past.

in the movie, she just kill, kill and kill and look awesome so the contrast of the movie to the series is a refreshing approach. :)

That’s an interesting way to look at it, and I can definitely see where you’re coming from with it being refreshing when coming from The Last Vampire. But in that same thought, maybe that’s why the characters and events in the series came across as flat and uncreative. They had a concept they wanted to work with, but maybe they didn’t have any real details worked out, so they just took out handfuls from the Large Bag of Anime Tricks and Tropes and decided that would be enough. I don’t think that’s inherently a bad thing, but it just didn’t seem like they tried very hard to add to these archetypical personalities, roles, or plot points.

it was such a long time ago when i last saw this anime. XD but i actually liked the interaction between Saya’s human side and vampire side, her relation to her brothers and how the dynamic of family was the only thing holding Saya back from the anti hero of the movie and the nicely told story of Diva’s life.
i didn’t think these things were flat.
yeah, the action was a bit lacking but the story is pretty nice. :)
may i ask what you wanted to happen instead of the things that happened in the anime?? more action packed??

This might just be something that we won’t be able to agree on. I didn’t think the characters had enough depth and I don’t feel like the writing was good enough for just the characters and interactions to carry the whole anime. If there was more/better action, then yeah, I’d be able to enjoy it more. But I don’t want you to get the wrong idea and think that I’m just upset because I wanted more action. I would even be okay if there was no action in Blood+ at all, as long as the characters and story were to my tastes/standards. But how it is now, they just weren’t.

Blood+’s Saya is infinitely weaker than Blood: The Last Vampire’s Saya, both in terms of personality and the amount of writing put into each of them. The family ties are nice and all, but what’s the point when you fail to humanize a character so hard that you end up making her unlikeable and uninteresting? At least Saya from the movie didn’t stand there idly while her family got chopped apart by Chiropterans, or wait for her bland, generic shoujo boyfriend to swoop her off her feet and save her bridal-style when she should be the one fighting because she’s the main fucking protagonist… Just because something lasts longer, that doesn’t mean to say it’s worth it. Blood: The Last Vampire is a great short film that you can get at a cheap price, and is a much less painful and less expensive experience than Blood+.

I watched Blood+ on Netflix, with the terrible dub. It made the lack of character depth even more obvious. I applaud you for making it through the series. Did you watch Blood C at all? I suffered through 3 episodes of that before I had to just drop it, for much the same faults as Blood+. But hey, at least the next live action movie looks pretty cool.

I should get double applause, because I’ve now watched Blood+ in its entirety twice. Once streaming the dub from Hulu, and the second time from fansubs in Japanese because I’m immoral like that. I have actually seen all of Blood-C, and you’re completely right about it having the same flaws. Actually, I’d say Blood-C has many of those flaws far worse than Blood+ does.

At least Blood-C had some nice fighting (once you had actually sat through twenty minutes of cicadas and Saya singing, anyway) and that very special type of unintentional humor caused by how ridiculous and gratuitous the violence gets about half way through. That’s something, right? … right?

She’s the most frustrating-to-watch, unrealistic, pathetic, cringe-worthy and downright retarded female lead character I’ve ever seen. I seriously wonder if she has special needs, because no normal person would act like she does given the situations… She’s able to easily kill a Chiropteran in the first episode, and yet when her father is in danger, she shakes with fear and screams “I CAN’T!!!” whilst letting the Chiropteran slice his stomach open an nearly kill him. Then she then makes the same mistake twice and this time he dies. What kind of bullshit writing is this? afterward, she starts to train with a sword and hint at the possibility of, ohhhh I dunno, CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT, but throws it all out of the window when she needs her boring and dull boyfriend Hagi to swoop in and save her just for the sake of pleasing the fangirls with fanservice of him holding our awful protagonist bridal-style. I don’t mind fanservice for girls, but this is the main fucking character here. She should be the one slicing Chiropterans up, not her drone of a boyfriend! She’s not even a damsel… Whenever she does do something useful, it comes out of nowhere like a Mary Sue, but most of the time all the problems and disasters our pathetic-excuses for heros encounter are a result of Saya standing there like the ugly mannequin she is (for example, when Solomon and Hagi fight over Saya, she doesn’t intervine and stop them. She just silently takes Hagi’s side and stares at Solomon like a retard, even after he poured himself out to her and revealed his true and noble intentions to her and how he wants to help her in killing his own mistress, Diva. Yet one more of many other examples of Saya being useless and the cause for most of the conflict in the story!).

Now, I’m one of the few people who will only watch an anime if they’re English Dubbed (if I see any comments telling me to watch subs, then I’ll delete them, because it’s my choice, it doesn’t effect you in any way, and I just prefer hearing my own language so I know the acting is good. Plus, if I wanted to read subtitles, I’d go read the fucking manga!), but I was surprised at how bad this dub is. They have great talents like Crispin Freeman, Steven Blum, Dave Wittenberg and Quinton Flynn, but everyone else either sounds dead, bored, over-acted or miscast. Crispin voices multiple characters including Hagi and the french guy, as well as other additional characters, and they must take their audiences for idiots, because it’s so obvious to pick him out every time he speaks. The dub screams Budget issues… It’s like they were trying to be obvious to the audience that they had no money to make a somewhat bareable dub…

And why do people outside of Japan have non-american accents? That completely removes the immersion of it being an English translation of the Japanese accent! I could understand if it were a British or Australian accent because their first language is English anyway, but having a Frenchman speak in a French accent while the Japanese and Americans both share the same accent? That’s an amateur Voice Director’s mistake. It works in Hellsing Ultimate because the main characters are English citizens and most of the anime takes place in England, so you would have Germans speak with German accents and Japanese with their accents or even speaking their own language.

The only redeeming qualities are Diva (I thought she was a fairly solid antagonist), the animation (nowhere near production I.G’s best work, but still decent for the most part) and the audio quality, excluding the bad acting. I really liked the openings, and the sound effects make everything that happens sound incredibly impact-full.